Books I have and use:From a moderate to mild Liberal scholarly protestant book about church history. This one volume covers alot. If you can get passed the mild liberalism of chapter one...or is it chapter 2? I forgot, but if you can get passed the mild liberalism/modernity/cynicism/skepticism of their treatment of the early first century, then you are good to go for most of the book is actually pretty good:A History of the Christian Church by Willston Walker

Another book that helps one understand why things are the way that they are. If you want to understand why I link modern cynicism with the Cynicism of the Reformation, then read this book. The book is really about hermeneutics and how it changed over the centuries. Basically, what the book says is that our modern way of looking at the natural world owes alot to how Reformed protestants looked at the natural sense of Scripture. If you only believe that Scripture has one sense and one sense only, then Scripture can only have one interpretation and that interpretation is the natural sense interpretation. Something similar happened to the way we looked at the natural world. Before the Reformation, we looked at the natural world as having multiple senses. Either sometime after the Reformation or congruent with it, we started to see it as having one sense and one sense only. And that one interpretation was the philosophical naturalistic one. The book also shows how the consistency in this direction eventually turned against it's former protestant (and Roman Catholic, but his focus is mostly on the protestant history and influence) masters and became the secular animal it is today. It's actually a great read....I loved it!The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison